Edition:

How freedom from repression has brought frustration and fear

A year ago this week coalition forces began their assault on Iraq. The Guardian has asked an Iraqi resident, a British soldier, a coalition official and an Iraqi politician how their lives have changed. Today: a story of life in Baghdad

Every week Najwa al-Bayati makes the 30-minute drive across Baghdad to her former office at the veterinary directorate of the agriculture ministry to ask when they will let her return to work.

In recent months she has become inured to disappointment, but as she walks back to the car today her hands are shaking and there are tears in her eyes. Inside the building she learned that a colleague who was a senior figure in the Ba'ath party has been allowed to return to her job. Najwa was told that the ministry's re-employment committee will not begin discussing her case until the end of March.

"They make me so upset," she says. "When you hear bad news like this, sometimes it is too much to bear."

Najwa - a 50-year-old widow, an ordinary middle-class Iraqi - is precisely the sort who had most to gain when America and Britain went to war a year ago.

She is well educated, a moderate Muslim and a staunch advocate of democracy and women's rights.

She was bitterly opposed to Saddam Hussein and saw her family torn apart by the brutality of his security forces. She cheered and danced when she saw footage on television - via her then illegal satellite dish - showing Saddam's bronze statuebeing wrenched to the ground.

In conversations over several days in her modest home in Aadhamiya, in northern Baghdad, she describes how in the past year her moment of celebration has soured into deep disillusionment and resentment of the US military occupation of her country. She is unemployed, heavily in debt to her friends, scared of the prospect of civil war and pessimistic about her family's and her country's future.

As a young veterinary student in Baghdad in 1971 Najwa joined the Communist party, one of only two groups that opposed the Ba'athists, who had seized power three years earlier.

Interrogated

She broke rigid social conventions by marrying a man with whom she had fallen in love, her teacher Azad, not someone selected for her by her parents. The couple lived happily together and had four children until, in 1991, an informer presented a report to the security services describing Azad's private criticisms of Saddam. He was arrested and interrogated.

The office of general security, one of the most feared security forces in Saddam's Iraq, called Najwa in for an interview. It forced her to make a heartbreaking choice.

"They told me my husband had not been charged. They said they wanted me to help them by writing reports about colleagues in my laboratory. They said if I agreed to help them my husband would be freed the next day. I told them, 'I can't do it. My husband is now with you so keep him and let me live with my children.' They said I would be punished for saying this."

Azad was tried and sentenced to 20 years in jail, with no right of appeal. Four years later he was freed during a rare prison amnesty but he was ill and in 1999 he died. Eight months earlier the couple's daughter, Samar, 21, a promising violinist, died after electrocuting herself on a light switch. Najwa was left with their three sons: Omar, now 24, Mustafa, 19, and Ashraf, 17. Now every day Najwa - dressed in black, with a black scarf over her hair and no make-up - drives along a four-lane flyover in northern Baghdad that passes the graves of her husband and daughter. Each time she closes her eyes, raises her hands, and mouths a silent prayer.

Najwa qualified as a vet in Baghdad in 1976. For more than 20 years she worked at the agriculture ministry, specialising in virology, studying the transfer of diseases between animals.

She wanted to study for a masters and a doctorate and was once offered a place at a university in Bangalore, southern India. But because she was not a member of the Ba'ath party her requests for further study were refused.

In 2000 she found work at the UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation, a highly sought after job, and her salary went from a state wage of just a few pounds to around £700 a month.

But last summer, just before the UN decided to pull out of Iraq after a bombing at their headquarters killed 22 people, her contract was "terminated" without explanation. She says she is still owed more than £4,000 in back pay.

From the veterinary directorate, Najwa crosses town through the choking traffic to the headquarters of the Communist party. Although communist by name, most of the party's members are practising Muslims and the party's doctrine is more pragmatic than idealistic. Large portraits of Marx and Lenin hang in the main hall of the building, looking down on crowds of chattering party officials, many of whom are counting prayer beads through their fingers.

To get her job back Najwa needed to produce a letter of recommendation from a recognised party.

She naturally presented a letter from the Communist party but, to her frustration and anger, it carried little influence. Yet those who have presented recommendations from the Shia religious parties, which are growing in influence in postwar Iraq, have been much more successful.

Najwa has returned to the veterinary directorate to confront one of the communist officials, Subhair Jumaili, and to vent her frustration.

"How come my colleague who was a Ba'athist got her job back?" she asks him.

"It's a problem and it takes time. It's not an easy job," he answers.

"Why didn't I join the Ba'ath party? I'm so angry about this," she snaps back.

"We want them eliminated, every member. We want even our children to forget there was a Ba'ath party in Iraq," she says.

He admits that recommendation letters from the communists do not always carry the same weight as those from the religious parties. "We get some obstacles from some ministers. It is not something we are happy with. We want to get rid of such ideas and for this we need a transitional authority," he says.

The meeting is a painful exercise for Najwa. She has listened to entreaties for patience for many months now.

Later, over Turkish coffee in her front room, Najwa talks about the changes of the past year. In the months before the war she and her children had been watching the Arab satellite channels, bribing Ba'ath officials not to impound their satellite dish.

It meant she knew the war was coming and that Saddam would fall. She stocked up on food and water and the family lived in the basement of their three-storey house, glued to the television. After 10 days the electricity cut out and so they travelled to friends who lived near Balad, north of the capital.

Again they watched satellite television, this time sitting with many Saddam sympathisers. "We all watched the television together. We were very glad when Sad dam was gone, so we were laughing. But they were crying because they loved him so much," she says. "When the statue fell we cheered but they covered their eyes and turned away from the television."

She was strongly in favour of the war, although she believes it was fought in part for oil and in part for George Bush's personal desire for revenge against a leader who had defied his father.

"Nobody else could have done it," she says. "If they didn't enter Iraq we would have stayed under Saddam and his family for 100 years."

Since then, her enthusiasm for the Americans has faded. Losing her job has heightened her frustration, but there are other more practical worries. The electricity supply in Aadhamiya used to be almost uninterrupted, with the supply down for perhaps an hour each day, usually in the middle of the night.

Now the electricity is on for three hours and off for another three. Every month Najwa pays 50,000 dinars (£25) for 10 amperes of electricity from a generator owned by a neighbour.

The power is enough to run a few lights and the television, but not the fridge or the deep freeze. Other regular costs have increased considerably over the year: canisters of gas for cooking, kerosene for heating, meat and vegetables.

She worries about her sons. Next year Mustafa will move from a £300-a-year private college, where he is currently top of the class in his computer studies course, to a government school, where tuition is free.

She worries about the worsening security on the streets of her city and rarely travels out after dark.

A close friend, Wafir Saleeh, was attacked last month. He was badly beaten and had his car stolen. He is a furious critic of the occupation. "We lost our country, we lost our security," he says. "Will it be OK? We don't know. Where is Iraq going? Who is responsible? They are doing nothing."

Aggressive

Najwa believes the insurgency campaign that has claimed hundreds of Iraqi lives since the war is in part al-Qaida inspired and in part a response to the aggressive attitude of most American soldiers.

"At the beginning there was no resistance, but the behaviour of the American army meant there was a resistance. At the beginning when they came past the house we offered them coffee. Now they have changed, they don't talk to us at all."

Like many, she worries that if the military leaves too quickly, society will descend into a bloody civil war.

The anger felt by ordinary Iraqis like Najwa for the suffering their families endured for so many years will be hugely difficult to resolve. For a start, she wants to see Saddam hanged in the streets of Baghdad, but even that will not be enough to satisfy her resentment.

"Maybe if the American army is gone the Iraqi people will kill the Ba'athists themselves," she says. "It has started in the south. Now the people are trying to keep everything as it is but they will take their revenge eventually. We need patience to see what will happen to our country."

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